Tracee Ellis Ross is a star of Black-ish, and directed this season’s most emotionally charged scene. She’s a Time’s Up ambassador and a TED-certified expert on the topic of female fury. And she’s showbiz royalty at the height of her powers. “The business is finally catching up to the genius that is Tracee,” says close pal Kerry Washington.

Tracee Ellis Ross was covered in a prickly sweat. It was a February
morning on the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank, and the actress was
taking on a daunting new role, directing a pivotal episode of Black-ish,
the ABC sitcom she has starred in as matriarch Rainbow Johnson for
nearly four years. A location got changed. Extras were involved.
Decisions had to be made. And the cast and crew who had always been her
peers were suddenly looking to Ross expectantly for answers. After
calling cut on the first scene, Ross ducked into her trailer and started
furiously texting her girlfriends. “I was like, ‘O.K., I’m fucking
terrified,’ ” Ross says. “Like, that shit was hard. That was really
fucking hard.”

Ross’s group chat included Kerry Washington, Eva Longoria, America
Ferrera, and Rashida Jones, and she quickly received some high-powered
affirmation. “I told her I feel like some of the best acting I’ve done
on Scandal was pretending I knew what I was doing when I was
directing,” Washington says. Ross marshaled two of her greatest
resources—her tribe of supportive female friends and her ability to
push through her fear—exhaled, and stepped back onto the set. When the
episode premiered in April, it marked a new tone for Black-ish and a new
moment in Ross’s constant self-reinvention.

Photographs by Lauren Dukoff.

The past year has been full of such moments for Ross, who recently
delivered a TED Talk on the potent subject of female fury, served as a
guest host on Jimmy Kimmel Live!—explaining sexual harassment via a
children’s book called The Handsy Man—and appeared in Drake’s “Nice
for What” video, shimmying in the desert in a silver sequined jumpsuit.

It has also been a year of taking risks and of asking for more,
including in a Black-ish salary renegotiation amid the industry-wide
equality conversation sparked by Time’s Up. As with other actresses,
including Michelle Williams (All the Money in the World) and Claire Foy
(The Crown), the fact that Ross had a pay disparity with her male
co-star, Anthony Anderson, became public.

“That was really fucking awkward,” Ross says. “I don’t know how that
information got out. But I understand the interest because there is a
larger, deeper, more important conversation going on that is not about
me, but is about people being paid appropriately for their contribution
and the work that they do, not because of their gender, race, or
anything. And it is a valid, real, important, past-due conversation that
should no longer be a conversation, that should just be handled . . .
across all industries.”

Of her own salary gap, Ross would say only, “That has been resolved.”
(One of Ross’s enviable qualities is her ability to draw
boundaries—she’ll post a workout on Instagram and banter with fans on
Twitter, but when she decides a topic is too personal, she politely
shuts it down.)

Ross modeled in her early years, even walking the Thierry Mugler runway with her mother, Diana Ross. Ross wears a suit by Brunello Cucinelli; boots by Gianvito Rossi; necklace by Anita Ko.

Photographs by Lauren Dukoff.

On Black-ish, Ross plays a doctor who is also a married mother of five.
It’s a role that has earned her two Emmy nominations, one Golden Globe,
and a place at the center of pop-culture conversations about race,
gender, and family. But playing Bow Johnson has also landed Ross, a
happily single, 45-year-old woman without children, on the receiving end
of some extremely nosy questions. “Last year, I was [fictionally]
pregnant all season,” Ross says. “That brought on a lot of comments
and questions and pontifications from people with no invitation. I
literally have said to people, for real, no joke, ‘Why don’t you just
get out of my womb? Like, get out of my uterus? What are you doing in
there? And why are you asking those questions? And what makes you think
you can ask that?’ Part of what patriarchy has created for women is this
siloed-off experience, with one answer for what a good life looks
like.”

Ross grew up with a decidedly unique model of womanhood—her mother,
from whom she inherited her impeccable bone structure and the ability to
pull off a silver sequined jumpsuit, is Diana Ross. Her father, from
whom she got her wit, is Robert Ellis Silberstein, who was Ross’s first
husband. Like Bow Johnson, Diana Ross is a mother of five, and there’s a
ride-or-die quality to the Ross siblings, who pop up often on Tracee’s
Instagram feed. As a child, Ross says, she witnessed not only her
mother’s undeniable sparkle as a performer but also her competence. “I
saw a woman who just was making a path and doing it on her own,” Ross
says. “She didn’t have hundreds of people doing everything for her—my
mom always packed her own bags and cooked our food. She was doing it all
and never had the response to me . . . where she was like, ‘Not now,
I don’t have time.’ It was very capable, incredibly capable and present
at the same time.”

Ross devoured TV as a kid, particularly female-driven shows such as
Wonder Woman, Charlie’s Angels, Cagney & Lacey, Kate & Allie, and,
most influential to her, I Love Lucy and The Carol Burnett Show. “The
combination of humor and glamour, I mean, it’s my parents, right
there,” Ross says. “There was a recognition and an identification of
‘Oh, my God, that’s me. That’s my tribe. Those are my people.’ It
allowed me to be more myself. I was sort of looking at those shows once
and I thought, Oh, no wonder I became who I am! So was it in my DNA or
was it socialization? I don’t know, but it seems obvious that I would
become this lady.”

Ross, photographed in Los Angeles. Ross wears a coat by Rodarte.

Photographs by Lauren Dukoff.

From speaking engagements to social media to what she wears on red
carpets, Ross believes in the power of culture, and she’s conscious of
her role in shaping it. “Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball, Wonder
Woman—they informed me,” she says. “No, they were not women of
color, but look what’s here now. . . . We know that storytelling
changes how we see ourselves and how others see us. There’s evidence of
this. These things make a difference. They’re not for naught. Do I think
that television is changing the world? Yes and no. There’s a tilling of
the soil that occurs.”

After growing up in New York and Europe, where she attended boarding
school in Switzerland, Ross graduated from Brown University with a
theater degree, and worked in fashion as a model and as an editor at
Mirabella and New York magazines. Her early acting auditions were
humbling. “Being a ‘child of’ meant that you were sort of riding on the
coattails of your parent,” she says. “It would unlock the door and
then people would sit on the other side . . . waiting for you like,
‘She’s no Diana Ross.’ At a very young age, even before I wanted to be
an actor, I felt just the energy that was coming at me because I was a
piece of somebody that people loved.”

After a series of small parts in TV and film, Ross landed a
life-changing role, as a lead on the UPN/CW sitcom Girlfriends. The
show, which ran for eight years starting in 2000, was groundbreaking in
centering on the work, friendships, and love lives of black women. Yet,
despite its longevity and success, Girlfriends did not open every door
Ross hoped it would. “When I was on Girlfriends, I thought I would be
able to get on David Letterman or Jay Leno or some talk show, and I
never—it never happened,” she says. “After being the lead on a show
for eight years that did incredibly well, I thought perhaps the seas
might part and I would have my choice and my pick of the litter—no,
that didn’t happen.” The television industry was a vastly different
landscape then, too, one with fewer networks and fewer opportunities for
a creative person to blaze her own path. “We’re in a very different
time now, where you can produce and create—and [Insecure
creator-star] Issa Rae is such a great example—but that didn’t exist
when I was on Girlfriends,” Ross says. “You couldn’t create a show for
YouTube and then get it to go on HBO.”

When she was cast in Black-ish, in 2014, Ross, for the second time in
her career, became part of a show that was a cultural phenomenon and was
reshaping the way black women are portrayed on television. This time the
show is on a bigger network, ABC, and is earning more attention from TV
critics and awards voters. In addition to Ross’s two Emmy nominations,
Black-ish has earned two nominations for outstanding comedy series and
three nods for Ross’s co-lead and screen husband, Anthony Anderson. In
2017, Ross became the first black woman in 34 years to win the Golden
Globe for best actress in a TV musical or comedy—the last was Debbie
Allen for Fame, in 1983. Black-ish has also won a Peabody Award and 22
N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards. Since its pilot, the show has been defined by
creator Kenya Barris’s skill and fearlessness in taking on heady topics,
with memorable episodes on the n-word, police brutality, and the 2016
election. This season, in an eyebrow-raising move, ABC shelved a
politically themed episode that had already been shot, over creative
differences with Barris, a dispute Ross says she knew little about.
“I’ve attempted to stay out of it,” she says. “I don’t know what
knowing would do to help the process.”

Ross has two Emmy nominations for her role as Bow Johnson in Black-ish. Ross wears a dress by Norma Kamali; ring by Jennifer Fisher; head wrap by Gigi Burris. Throughout: hair products by Mizani; makeup by Chanel.

Photographs by Lauren Dukoff.

The show also recently explored new emotional terrain within the Johnson
household, particularly in an episode titled “Mother Nature,” which
focused on Bow’s postpartum depression. “I had never seen a comedy dive
into postpartum in that way, and the fact that within 22 minutes we were
able to unpack something with authenticity and honesty and still find
the levity within it was an exciting task as an actor,” Ross says. “I
got to lean in to those parts of myself that have experienced sadness,
depression, frustration, upset, disappointments.”

The episode Ross directed, “Fifty-Three Percent”—her first time
taking on that job since an episode of Girlfriends that aired in
2008—kicked off a series arc where the normally affectionate, stable
Johnson marriage begins to fracture. The show starts with images of
famous couples—the Obamas, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Beyoncé and
Jay-Z—and a recitation of a damning statistic about marriage.
Ultimately the camera lands above Bow and Dre in bed, their backs to
each other, and rises higher and higher above the clearly unhappy duo.
As with TV couples from Mike and Carol Brady to Cliff and Claire
Huxtable, Bow and Dre often spend key scenes in their bed, arguing,
parenting, and loving. But this wasn’t shot like any of those. “I
wanted to get really far away from the bed but somehow see this couple
that we always see, anchored in this bed from a very different vantage
point,” she says. For Ross, an important part of directing is knowing
her own mind, a trait that comes easily, she says, because of her
upbringing. “My mother is a woman who completely possessed her own
agency and embodied a sense of her own power, unapologetically,” Ross
says. “I think that lends itself to directing. I don’t have a fear in
making a choice or expressing my opinion even if no one else likes
it—or not even expressing it, but owning it for myself.”

Ross has spent a career dreaming bigger, Washington says, and if it
seems she’s having a career moment now, that’s only because more people
are paying attention. “Tracee takes on new roles, new tasks, new
responsibilities, new demands,” Washington says. “She’s always been
that way. I couldn’t be happier for the rest of the world that they’ve
caught up with her. The business is finally catching up to the genius
that is Tracee.”

Like many women in Hollywood, Ross has been engaged in the Time’s Up
movement, devoted to rooting out sexual harassment and inequality in the
workplace. She also hired a new team of female agents at UTA earlier
this spring. Perhaps her most visible Time’s Up moment was at the
unusual 2018 Golden Globes, where women wore black and brought activists
with them on the red carpet. Growing up the daughter of a fashion icon
and working in the fashion industry early in her career, Ross loves
beautiful clothes and deploys them deftly to express herself. At the
Globes, she wore a sleek black Marc Jacobs dress and a regal-looking
turban that managed to communicate the power she and her female
colleagues were attempting to reclaim. “It felt like I didn’t have to
say much because my clothing was saying a lot,” Ross says. “Sort of an
owning of my legacy, both my personal legacy, as my mom’s child, and as
a black woman.”

As the industry evolves, Ross says, she’s seeing change on-screen all
around her. During an interview, she reached for her phone to quote a
line spoken by Storm Reid in Ava DuVernay’s recent Disney movie, A
Wrinkle in Time. “That last moment when the apparent love interest
says—I actually wrote it down, hang on—he says, ‘You did it.’ And
she responds, ‘I did.’ I thought that was monumental,” Ross says. “For
a young girl—a young black girl—on-screen to hold her own power and
not share it and give it away sends a really interesting message that we
don’t often see.” It’s no accident that the moment spoke to Ross. It’s
a story she has long been trying to tell us.

Styled by Ryan Young. Hair by Marcia Hamilton. Makeup by Lisa Storey. Set Design by Lauren Machen. Produced on location by Connect the Dots.